Journal
BEHAVIOUR
Volume 158, Issue 6, Pages 447-478Publisher
BRILL
DOI: 10.1163/1568539X-bja10076
Keywords
pair bond; courtship; personality; assortative mating; exploration; mate choice; zebra finch
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award [F31HD096848]
- Cornell University Field of Psychology Graduate Student Research Awards Fund
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In species with long-term pair bonds like zebra finches, evaluating the quality of potential mates through courtship, using behavioral cues, is important. Personality traits play a significant role in mate choice, with birds selecting partners similar to them in exploration. The partner's exploration score relative to their own was found to be more important than the absolute score.
In species with long-term pair bonds, such as zebra finches, evaluating the quality of potential mates is critically important. Courtship is an opportunity to evaluate information from dynamic behavioural cues. Personality traits, as stable individual differences in behaviour, could predict the quality of a potential mate. How might personality traits influence mate choice? We examined the influence of several personality traits, including exploration, aggression, and social preference, on pair formation in zebra finches. We provided birds with a variety of potential mates and allowed them to select a pair partner. Our semi-naturalistic mate choice paradigm allowed birds to observe social information over an extended period, simulating the challenges of social evaluation that birds encounter in the wild. We found that pairing is influenced by personality, with birds selecting mates similar to them in exploration. The partner's exploration score relative to their own was more important than the absolute exploration score.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available